Brian, At Liberty University, we are a Cisco shop. In 2008, we moved from Cisco fat APs with Clean Access to Aruba APs with Aruba ECS (Bradford Campus Manager -> Network Sentry) for wireless & Cisco wired NAC. The product & support were later moved to the generic Campus Manager.
In late 2011, a few issues cause us to look for a different authentication & NAC solution. 1. We ended up with Bradford’s Network Sentry Manager controlling 3 server node pairs. At that time, this solution did not scale well. Each node evaluated a client differently, with no information sharing between nodes. 2. Bradford’s support pricing increased to Cisco support levels., even after getting them to not charge virtual ip addresses as separate servers. There were also other negotiation issues regarding support pricing. 3. As we started moving to an 802.1X wireless & wired network, we found that, at that time the Bradford solution did not prioritize user roles and therefore would not suit our needs. 4. There was a movement from internal IT management to move away from a remediation NAC solution due to customer experience & the internal resources needed to support a NAC solution. 5. We desired a wireless Guest management solution. 6. Aruba purchased AmigoPod & Avenda. Their engineering department worked with us in setting up a ClearPass Proof-of-concept environment, configured for our environment. In 2012, we moved from Bradford to ClearPass. We now use ClearPass for wireless, wireless guest, and Cisco wired. We use ClearPass APIs with our own custom portal server for 802.1X onboarding with CloudPath Wizard & mac device registration for non-802.1X systems such as game consoles. For an Aruba shop, the AirGroup integration between Aruba wireless & ClearPass is a definite plus. AirGroup is Aruba’s solution for Apple AirPlay & other streaming devices. We have had good success supporting Apple TVs. We will soon add support for Chromecast & Roku. Feel free to contact me ofline for additional information. Bruce Osborne Wireless Engineer IT Network Services - Wireless (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 From: Brian Helman [mailto:bhel...@salemstate.edu] Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:10 PM Subject: Aruba and Bradford Feel free to ping me off-list. I may sanitize/redact comments and repost them for the benefit of others though.. If you are an Aruba AND Bradford shop, what was you reason for using Bradford vs Clearpass? Our primary interest in NAC is onboarding and guest networks (wired and wireless). We are currently a Bradford shop. I don’t see a reason to change, but I’d like to understand the benefits (or drawbacks) for staying with Bradford (or moving to Clearpass, for that matter). If you migrated from Bradford to Clearpass, would you do it again? Pains? Successes? Vendors: This is not a solicitation for NAC’s or wireless. I’m collecting information. Thanks! -Brian ____________________________________ Brian Helman, M.Ed | Director, ITS/Networking Services | •: 978.542.7272 Salem State University, 352 Lafayette St., Salem Massachusetts 01970 GPS: 42.502129, -70.894779 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
